As the dark and frustrating 2020 is winding down, I feel incredibly optimistic about 2021 and beyond. Part of it is my entrepreneurial nature that requires it and part of it is a number of recent developments that bring me hope and I love drinking hope for breakfast.
A number of recent readouts from SARS-CoV-2 trials, particularly those from Pfizer and Moderna, which use a novel mRNA platform, look efficacious and safe in the short-term. (Long-term safety can not be evaluated in rapid clinical trials but the FDA guidelines provide for long-term, post-licensure, safety monitoring.) As soon as these vaccines are made available to the general public and assuming no major safety issues are surfaced, I am getting vaccinated and resuming my pre-pandemic travel schedule.
In case you missed it, on May 30th we witnessed the first American manned space flight since 2011. I watched it in real-time that Saturday and then many more times with my son Andrei who just loves watching rockets being launched into space. Since then, watching launches on Saturdays became a Novik family tradition. Seeing Andrei’s eyes light up every time we do it, brings me an unreasonable amount of joy.
Two weeks ago I ordered my first Virtual Reality headset — Oculus Quest 2. I don’t love the Facebook login requirement but as a newcomer to the world of VR, I am completely blown away by how easily my senses are fooled and by the near-perfect rendering of 3D worlds. It is clear to me that VR is a major technological trend with ramifications far beyond gaming. I can’t wait to virtually sit in front of my family and friends all over the world and interact with them as if we are in the same room. The technology is not quite there to make the experience realistic but I have little doubt that it’s coming. (As a side note, the game Room in VR is nothing short of amazing.)
During the summer, we made a lot of progress at Generable with fitting large meta-analytic models for oncology drugs, and our abstract was accepted at SITC 2020, an immuno-oncology conference. This is a big deal for us as it represents the first publication outside of statistics journals. Most of the work was done by Jacqueline Buros and Krzysztof Sakrejda and is a culmination of our year-long research collaboration with AstraZeneca.
And if this is not enough, 2021 promises to be a much more sane US Federal Government with adults finally taking over and mitigating the Fifth Risk. No doubt countless problems remain (I don’t want to list them) but I am feeling lucky and optimistic.